When installer Jack Schroeder bought 52 acres of land in southeastern Wisconsin a few years ago, the previous owner had one request. Having spent 45 years planting and maintaining the thousands of trees on the property, building rocks walls, and creating miles of trails, essentially turning it into a vast park, he asked Jack to keep the land intact and development-fee. Jack has gladly honored that request, even as developers have greedily gobbled up the surrounding area, filling it with tract housing.
Maintaining the property continues to be a labor of love for Jack and his wife, who co-own their Milwaukee installation business, Sound Designs. But, when they took over the land, Jack found himself with a massive barn and nothing to store there but his lawn mower. So he decided to turn it into a high-end party space, filling it with heaping stacks of NHT speakers and McIntosh electronics (above).
You'll find 30 Evolution M6 monitor speakers there, complemented by 30 thunderous Evolution 12-inch subwoofers. And all those drivers are powered by a prodigious mound of McIntosh electronics that includes an array of amps — two 1,200-watt monoblocks and a 500-watt monoblock, two 600-watt, one 400-watt, and one 250-watt stereo amp, plus a 200-watt-per-channel five-channel amp, pumping out over 5,000 watts in all. (There's also a McIntosh MX119 surround processor.) Twenty dedicated amp circuits keep all the gear healthy and safe.
While the system can be used for stereo or surround playback, it's not strictly set up for either, and wheels on the speaker stacks let Jack roll them into different positions to allow for various size gatherings — or just to blast music out the barn doors (above). Jack has two projectors — a Sony Qualia 006 and a Sim2 C3X — tucked away in the hayloft (right, top) for shining images onto a massive 200-inch Stewart Snapper Screenwall (right, middle). At the moment, the projectors are mainly used for showing things like concerts and music videos at parties, but Jack is thinking about turning the low-ceilinged bar area into a dedicated surround-sound setup for movie watching (right, bottom).
Not everybody has a big, empty barn sitting around waiting to be turned into Party Central, but almost everybody has a garage, basement, or spare room that could be livened up with a little bit of gear and a little bit of imagination. There's no rule that says every rectangular entertainment space has to be turned into a by-the-book home theater. Sometimes it's important to do not what makes the most sense, but what sounds like the most fun.
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